Out There | Consumer Culture

An image from K-HOLE, a publication that blurs the line between art and marketing.

You won’t find terms like “fragMOREentation” and “proLASTination” in M.B.A. textbooks. Not yet anyway. These are some of the “concepts” invented and explored by K-HOLE, a “trend forecasting report” collaboratively published by Greg Fong, Sean Monahan, Emily Segal, Chris Sherron and Dena Yago, five New York mid-20-somethings who straddle art, marketing and the fractal of grays between the two.

The first issue, May 2011, was released online and via 100 rubber Livestrong-style bracelet USB drives; K-HOLE’s second installment had its debut at MoMA PS1 in February. Not critique and not satire, the project is a wry, aesthetic expression of odd potentials latent in the margins of rote corporate culture. Its latest, “a report on patience,” offers straightforward case studies on a neuro-enhancing drug, Korea’s first “smart city,” a behavioral surveillance gadget and brands that encourage consumers not to buy their products. While K-HOLE’s voice is keenly direct, it resonates as enticingly cryptic.

K-HOLE’s second issue was released in February via USB drives inside dog tags.

I met with three members of the group for coffee in NoHo one unseasonably warm spring morning. As I sat down I received a chrome, dog-tag-inspired USB drive on a chain containing the current report. Fong ordered a hot cocoa.

Kevin McGarry: So, what exactly is K-HOLE?

Dena Yago: So, K-HOLE is a trend forecasting report. We’ve been releasing PDFs based on actual reports that usually circulate in a rarefied way, where they cost a lot of money and don’t leave the market of ad agencies. Even within that market they are unnecessarily restricted. We think this is applicable to art in such a way that we wanted to work between both worlds.

Emily Segal: And the other thing about trend forecasting is, it’s not a very developed discourse. But, in what exists there are already formats and tropes and constructions, there’s a lot of silliness and ridiculousness and neologisms and emoticons used in corporate documents. There are really beguiling, ambiguous interior space images and one suggestive picture — say some kind of street-style snap. We saw this genre as connected to so many things that we were interested in; it also resonates as really funny taken out of its context. So, to call K-HOLE fan fiction would be wrong — because it isn’t satirical or fake — but the gesture at first was in the spirit of fan fiction, in that we thought trend forecasting was worth emulating in a different format.

Greg Fong: It’s also like fan fiction in the sense that trend forecasters are already trying to imitate art language, so K-HOLE seemed really natural to us, like something that wanted to be produced.

E.S.: A lot of marketing, lifestyle marketing for instance, revolves around our demographic living in global cities working in art and media, wearing certain things and drinking certain … cocoa.

K.M.: And the name?

E.S.: The name was chosen before the project ever started, just because we liked it. Given what it turned out to be, we like the way the name K-HOLE is an extreme version of the corporate taste for drawing on youth, drug and countercultures for lifestyle inspiration. It also references the tunnel vision or disorienting effects of being in an actual K-hole as a way to describe our cultural P.O.V.

K.M.: Have any of you had any formal business training or 9-to-5 encounters with corporate culture?

E.S.: I didn’t when we did the first issue, but coincidentally, I actually do trend research for a brand agency now and I’m a brand strategist. Before that I’d pretty much only worked on magazines, mostly fashion writing. Fashion is a very efficient language for talking about brands and forecasting and to think about what comes next. We’re trying to expand on this to include things that wouldn’t ordinarily be considered fashion … and it’s more fun this way, to be able to talk about more than just a new collection or something.

D.Y.: Greg and I each have experiences in corporate jobs and settings, but not in any way that pertains to doing branding work.

K.M.: Well, just being there you pick up on a certain tonal language.

D.Y.: Yeah, like having a Blackberry. …

K.M.: So what do you all do?

D.Y.: For K-HOLE, Emily works as the brand strategist, while Greg, Sean and I are artists. Chris is our creative director. Then we all have different day jobs. Greg and I are software developers.

E.S.: Chris and I actually work together at our job.

K.M.: And Sean?

D.Y.: He works for a wealthy Swiss woman.

E.S.: He’ll take her Ducati to get fixed.

K.M.: Particularly in the blind case studies that introduce your first two issues, I wasn’t sure at first if you were playing around with a style of business writing to create fiction, or if they were actual, factual studies. This ambiguity must be part of what you’re after.

D.Y.: Some of the feedback we’ve had about the second issue is that it sounds really futuristic, but we’re discussing instances of products that already exist, as if we’re prescribing how their use can be continued. It seems to be a space that makes people uncomfortable because what we’re describing as the future has already happened —

E.S.: — five minutes ago.

G.F.: Right.

E.S.: I think we accidentally did stumble into that space because with the first issue people were like, is this like … The Onion? Just to give a flattened comparison, which is also an inaccurate one. Blind case studies, for instances, are a completely classic corporate style of writing. I suppose they’re as fictional as anything else, but in both issues they’re based on real stuff … but with some twists.

K.M.: It’s interesting you bring up temporal disturbances because in your second issue you explore timing as essentially a means for expressing style.

E.S.: One thing we didn’t actually talk about in the issue but comes to mind now is with all of the whole Groupon, Gilt City, Lifebooker, Flash Sale, Deals and Discounts craze that’s changed the texture of the way people buy stuff — especially how affluent or aspiring-to-be-affluent people in cities buy stuff — it’s all about introducing a time scale to how you buy. Even Amazon Prime, which we talk about a lot, is a great example of that. It feels like books arrive to you before you’ve ordered them. So time is more and more the raw material of marketing, but like any conversation about time, as soon as you talk about it you blow your own mind.

G.F.: We also live in a reality where things are announced so far in advance of when they actually happen that everyone always already knows what to expect, whether it’s clothing or someone’s album. There’s always an idea that’s been circulating or at least invading people’s minds before they’re in people’s hands or closets.

D.Y.: The last issue was not only about time but timeliness, extending the practices of being on time to mean that you’re actually fashionably late up until the point where …

G.F.: … you might as well do something else.

D.Y.: Yeah, and then what that something else is becomes whatever is actually being created. And to be guided into that space is really kind of terrifying but … it’s totally what is happening.

E.S.: We’re really interested in people’s experiences of brands and culture. We’re not writing from the corporate perspective, we’re not trying to make money for anyone. The way we phrase it is we’re about the plausible limits of corporate and consumer strategy; consumer strategy not being what companies do to consumers, but what consumers do to companies or what consumers do in the world.

K.M.: It could be interesting to go ahead and try to pinpoint a project like this that so clearly resists being categorized. You’ve already talked about some things K-HOLE is and isn’t. So I wonder, if there’s a continuum where on one side you have corporate earning and on the other conceptual art, where do you fall? Off that track entirely?

G.F.: The cheeky sentiment that we came up with a year ago is that all marketing decisions are artistic decisions, a play on John Knight’s maxim that all design decisions are artistic decisions. I think for us as artists in this approach of producing K-HOLE we’re expressing artistic principles in a language that’s very direct, where we try to be as clear as possible.

E.S.: Matt Evans, a curatorial assistant at MoMA PS1 who helped us launch our second issue there, described it to me in a way I hadn’t though of before that’s really interesting. He said that the art world has been taking resources from the corporate world forever to support itself, but it made a mistake when it didn’t realize that it could also take ideas — and so that’s where we come in.

K.M.: What are your feelings on Dis, which is another New York collective of five young creatives who deal with related consumer and corporate aesthetics?

E.S.: Yeah, I love them, we all love them, and there definitely is some Venn diagram where we tread similar ground because part of what they do really well is use the effluvium of consumer culture to make new stuff and new ideas. Sometimes we’ll ask ourselves, oh, does this seem like Dis or does this seem like K-Hole? Which I guess is like our own branding. But we’re also always asking things like, does this seem like Starbucks or does this seem like K-Hole?

D.Y.: We’re conscious of it and we try to give it space.

K.M.: Have you made contact with the actual trend forecasting world since the project began? Or done any work for hire?

D.Y.: I’ve been asked to do consulting for small businesses.

E.S.: We’ve been approached by a small, pretty famous electronic music label, actually a friend of mine so it seems silly to phrase it that way, who read K-HOLE and thought it would be good if we’d help them do marketing. The time that we actually did perform work for a company was with one on the other end of the life spectrum and that was a private equity firm on Park Avenue.

D.Y.: We were hired specifically to do creative services, and so we weren’t actually doing a rebranding.

E.S.: Although to be fair, we did do quite a lot of brand thinking with the C.E.O.

G.F.: It was one of those situations where we were hired for our youthful insights, but he couldn’t care less about the trend report.

E.S.: I remember giving him the bracelet for the first issue. He gave it back and was like, I’ll never wear that. So he knew that we all did something together and in a vague way thought that was cool and good for him, but it’s not like he read K-HOLE and got an idea from it and wanted us to help him explore it.

D.Y.: The report in whatever form that it might take will be circulated freely and we don’t accept money for it. Outside of that, we are totally available … for hire.

E.S.: In various ways.

D.Y.: We’ll do anything.

E.S.: Dena will do anything.

K.M.: What’s next?

E.S.: We’re doing a project that expands on one of the case studies from the second issue. The third trend report, which we’re also working on now, isn’t just going to be just a PDF and USB but different case studies are going to take different forms. They could be a party or an experience or an object or a digital thing.